Sunday, April 8, 2012

Mike Wallace (1918-2012)

Alas; the end of an era. As someone who named her cat after Walter Cronkite, it's hard for me to see these icons fade away. Mike Wallace was a controversial character -- and he was, above all, a character -- but I mourn the loss of a truly "national" media in the LBJ-only-needed-3-Oval-Office-TV-sets-to-catch-all-the-news sense of the term. I realize this system had its shortfalls, but I feel there was an advantage in the reality that a less polymorphous media world forced us to communicate to at least some degree with each other. Today, we speak in parallel. More may speak, and this is a good thing. But when we speak in parallel, we fail to intersect. Mediating the challenges of our multivalent existence is something we will need to come to terms with if the new world is to represent any improvement over the old.